A Game of Monopoly

For 82 years the industrial town of Springfield, Mass, had a great daily newspaper. Horace Greeley called its doughty Republican "the best and ablest country journal ever published on this continent." For another 20 years, the declining Republican was just a member of a four-paper monopoly, and none of them could claim greatness. For 143 days this winter Springfield had no local papers. Last week, Springfield was back to one paper, but it was little better than none.

The man who now decides what kind of newspapers Springfield will have is Sherman Hoar Bowles, 57, a shrewd and unpredictable autocrat whose great-grandfather founded the Republican as a weekly in 1824. Sherman Bowles controls all four Springfield papers--and all the unions on all of them are currently on strike. Two weeks ago, Sherman Bowles decided to break the five-month strike against his dailies (TIME, Feb. 24). But instead of reviving the revered Republican, he chose to bring out his more profitable Daily News. This week he hoped to start up his morning Union. It is one symptom of what has happened in three generations that the once great Republican is the weakest of Sherman Bowles's four.

In another recent newspaper strike, Philadelphia's J. David Stern had bitterly resisted one union--the C.I.O. American Newspaper Guild--and lost the battle that nobody won (TIME, Nov. 18, et seq.). Bowles had joined battle with the Guild, and also the A.F.L. pressmen, stereotypers and printers. The difference was that he was almost sure to win. Sherman Bowles was a different kind of adversary. Bowles had long resisted the unions, especially the printers, and there were no model contracts in his shops, such as the Guild had with Dave Stern's Record. Furthermore, long-chinned Sherman Bowles was as hard to grapple with as a ghost.

Forest Primeval. The Bowles habitat is a trackless forest of holding companies. A man whose eggs (around $32 million worth) are cached in many baskets, he controls Atlas Tack Co., an airline, a pulp-magazine factory--but in other people's names. Three of his forebears were proud to have their names (all Sam) on their paper's masthead; Sherman likes to pose as "just an unpaid adman." Last fall Wall Street buzzed with the news that a grey-haired lady from Massachusetts had bought a $6 million skyscraper at 120 Wall. She turned out to be Mary Gallagher, faithful secretary to Bowles.

An eccentric since his Harvard days, Bowles has little time for fun, grabs most of his meals at the Bowles Lunch (no kin). He hates to be regimented; he had no use for Cousin Chester's OPA, and little newspaper space to report its doings. His talent for calculated confusion reaches into his papers, which work both sides of the street. The Republican for a time supported F.D.R.; the Union went G.O.P.; the News was Democratic.

Their publisher began as a hail-fellow who fraternized with the backshop boys, helped his mailers bundle papers, plowed fat profits into employee beneficiary funds. But his help considered itself underpaid--and after his printers struck in 1935, he lost some of his benevolence. During the strike, Bowles put out papers without type, on pages engraved from typewritten sheets. Later he trained office girls to run linotypes equipped with trick typewriter keyboards.

Awakening. Last fall Publisher Bowles, still mad at the printers, suddenly shut up shop rather than sign a contract with them. Deprived of news, Springfield was jolted into realizing what it can mean to be a monopoly town.*

Small merchants lost trade; florists found that people who could not read about deaths or weddings did not send flowers. A cinema hired a sound-truck to hawk its shows. Radio stations expanded their newscasts, but it was slim fare. Springfield still had not learned, by paper or radio, that one of the last links with journalistic greatness was gone. Famed Republican Editor Waldo Lincoln Cook, who supported many a cause that the boss did not like, had quit at 82.

Last week Sherman Bowles's non-union and all but adless Daily News reached 80,000 circulation despite pickets around the building. Its circulation is now half what the entire monopoly's was before the strike. People bought it, ignoring strikers' pleas to take out-of-town papers instead. Sherman Bowles has reached a truce with his pressmen and stereotypers and hopes to talk his printers into working without a contract. His dispirited employees of the Newspaper Guild, who struck only after he fired them, might be left out in the cold if the other unions went back to work.

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Last week in Camden, whose strikebound Courier and Post await a buyer, the Guild started a daily of its own. The 3¢ Camden Free Press, printed 30 miles away in Wilmington, started out with a 30,000 press run, plenty of ads, a non-salaried staff, a Guild shop.

* Among the 17 other press-monopoly cities (of 150,000 or more): Louisville, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Kansas City, Omaha, Akron, Memphis, Richmond, Toledo, Rochester, Providence.

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